I thought the entire premise of overclocking was that it's not officially supported and it may break things.
The whole point is that you're not paying for it and it's entirely at-risk.
Because if you do want a higher level of guaranteed performance, you do need to pay for a faster chip (if it exists).
It’s fair for the end user who bought a motherboard that promises a higher clock speed to expect that clock speed.
If you can provide links, I'd be curious to see what guarantees they make. "What's fair" depends very specifically on what language they use.
They have now entered the AI bubble with
https://www.asus.com/microsite/motherboard/Intelligent-mothe...
MSI has a similar setting, although I don't know exactly what models have it nor what it's called
Tell that to anyone who paid extra for a K-series Intel chip.
Its cheaper to have a single production line and then lock off features.
As crazy as i sounds it actually cost a little bit more to produce inferior version sold at cheaper prices.
The overclocking was a 'premium' feature due to possibility of melting the chip. But nowadays the temp sensors cut power to prevent catastrophic failure.
Also worth mention the downside to upclocking voltage is increased physical degradation of cores, ie lower lifespawn of cpu.
These chips require motherboards to function, and these unlocked chips get their configuration from the motherboard. There’s no analogous entity to Ferrari the company here, it is like you bought an engine from one company, a gearbox from another, and the gearbox had a “responsiveness enhancement” setting that always redlined your RPMs or something (I don’t know cars).
I don't know what you want Intel to do here. They tell you upfront what the power and clock limits are on the parts. But the market has a three decade history of people pushing the chips a little past their limit for fun and profit, so they "allow" it even if they know it won't work for everything.
- If I buy parts that are certified to work together, and I use them according to their respective manuals, they should work as specified.
- If I desire to manually change or customise something, I should be able to modify whatever I'd like.
- As soon as my changes go outside the certified range, I'm liable myself. But as long as I'm within of the certified range, warranty should still apply and the product should continue working as specified.
That's a blanket statement, and wrong. Ferrari doesn't allow unlicensed modifications of their cars.
You are able to customize many vehicles to your liking. And just like you can choose the options before sale, you're free to replace one official part with another official part after sale as well.
From what I can tell, this is limited to rims, tires, brakes, seats, passenger display, and other similar configuration options, though.
Search for "3000hp lambo" on youtube and you'll see what modification actually means.
We're talking about using one intel-certified part with another intel-certified part using intel-certified default settings.
I don't have a problem with end users experiencing instability once they manually overclock (that's how it goes), but CPU + mainboard combinations experiencing typical OC symptoms with out-of-the-box settings is just not OK.
This appears to be an arms race between mainboard vendors all going further and further past spec by default because it gives better benchmark and review scores and their competition does it. Intel for their part are themselves also dialing in their parts more aggressively (and, presumably although I don't know for sure, with smaller margins) over time, and they are for sure aware that this is happening, because a) even had they not known already (which they did) they would have learned about this months ago when we first contacted them about this issue, b) technically out of spec or not, as long as it seems to work fine for users and makes their parts look better in reviews, they're not going to complain.
However, it turns out, it does not work fine for at least some small fraction of machines. I have no idea what that percentage is, but it's high enough that googling for say "Intel 13900K crash" yields plenty of relevant results. Some of this will be actual intentional overclockers but, given how boards default to some extend of out-of-spec overclocking enabled, it's unlikely to be all of them.
Meanwhile we (and other SW vendors) are getting a noticeable uptick in crash reports on, specifically, recent K-series Intel CPUs, and it's not something we can sanely work around because the issue manifests as code randomly misbehaving and it's not even when doing anything fancy. The Oodle issue in particular is during LZ77-family decompression, which is to say, all integer arithmetic (not even multiplies, just adds, shifts and logic ops), loads/stores and branches. This is the bare essentials. If it was an issue with say AVX2, we could avoid AVX2 code paths on that family of machines (and preferably figure out what exactly is going wrong so we can come up with a more targeted workaround). But there is no sane plan B for "integer ALU ops, load/stores and branches don't work reliably under load". If we can't rely on that working, there is not enough left for us to work around bugs with!
I realize this all looks like finger-pointing, but this is truly beyond our capacity to work around in a sane way in SW, with what we know so far anyway. Maybe there is a much more specific trigger involved that we could avoid, but if so, we haven't found it yet.
Either way, when it's easy to find end user machines that are crashing at stock settings, things have gone too far and Intel needs to sit down with their HW partners and get everyone (themselves included) to de-escalate.
You think that might have something to do with you having put "Intel Processor Instability" in the title of a whitepaper on an issue that you already root caused to motherboard settings? I mean, did you want to troll a big flame war? Because this is how you troll a big flame war.
I don't think it's unreasonable to call that Intel's problem, maybe not in terms of culpability (but truly, nobody cares) but definitely in the sense this is doing damage to their brand. If the mainboards are all out of spec then they need to talk about this publicly, rein them in, start a certification program, whatever. Being publicly completely fine with this as long as it results in good review scores but then starting to go "well actually..." when there's stability issues on a small fraction of sold units is not a good look.
You didn't call it Intel's problem. You said Intel CPUs were "unstable", which simply isn't true. If your title was "Intel doesn't police default BIOS clocking", we wouldn't be this far down in the senseless thread about semantics. (Though to be fair, you wouldn't have been on the front page as long either, so maybe that's as intended.)
Out of the box with default settings, it was pushing 320W through the CPU in stress tests.
I use my machine for FPGA compiles so I need reliability. I learned that ASUS Multicore Enhancement is not the only thing that must be disabled, you must manually enter the power limits.
Now my compiles take exactly the same length of time but use at least 100W less power.
I am glad to know that with your field data, I've inadvertently sidestepped a potentially catastrophic bug. I don't want to release an FPGA bitstream to users with flipped bits. And the FPGA tools already crash on their own enough.
The problem is that Intel has normalized it so much that all their high end CPUs do this, and apparently do it often. It's not unexpected that they might be too close to the point where things are melting, so to speak.
I'd rather slower and more stable any day - I chose a Ryzen 7900 over a 7900X intentionally - but that isn't what all the marketing out there is trying to sell. The fancy motherboards, the water coolers, the highly clocked memory all account for lots of markup, so that's what's marketed. I'm not a fan.
It is worth noting a distinction between the terms "overclocking" and "turbo clocking". "Overclocking" has traditionally meant running the clock "over" the rating. "Turbo clocking" is now built in to almost every CPU out there. One technically can void your warranty, whereas the other doesn't.
Since we're mostly technical people here, we should use the appropriate term where the context makes that choice more accurate. It's like virus and Trojan - we SHOULD be technically correct, but that doesn't mean highly technical people aren't still calling Trojans viruses now and then.
This "I can run a core at a faster speed" is a documented feature so not really overclocking.
As an example of motherboard manufacturers going outside specifications, my MSI motherboard has a built-in option to change BCLK, which is the clock reference for the entire PCIe bus. Changing it not only overclocks the CPU, but also the GPU's connection (not the GPU itself), as well as the NVMe SSD.
This was so not-endorsed by Intel that they quickly pushed microcode that shuts the CPU down if it detects BCLK tampering.
In response, MSI added a dropdown that allows you to downgrade the microcode of the CPU.
So yeah. Very not within specifications.
If I run the chip in a way not documented by the manufacturer, or modify the ECU to allow the turbo to generate more boost, those are both unsupported modifications, and I'd consider either of those "overclocking"
I wonder if the old style “bump it up and memtest” type overclocking would catch this. Actually, what is the good testing tool nowadays? Does memtest check AVX frequencies?
I don't know how common this is across the whole population of PC buyers, but personally, I have for sure bought K-series parts then not clocked them past their stock settings, trusting that they are rated for it and deeply uninterested in any OCing past that. (I prefer my machines stable, thank you very much.)
He was so happy with the speed. Would not stop telling everyone, and talking about it. Yet as I watched him demo it, it rebooted every minute or so. Most unstable thing ever.
Sure it booted in 2 seconds, and he just went about his merry way, but.. what?! Guy could have still overclocked a little less and had stability, but nope.
Some overclockers are weird.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39479081
Somehow people think that it's a strawman, but people like parent comment actually think and post like this lol
The hyperthread and c-state stuff, eh, if you want to run code that might be a virus you will have to limit your system. I dunno. It would be a shame if we lost the ability to ignore that advice. Most desktops are single-user after all.
these chips that have been specially binned because they are supposedly stable at those frequencies (within an envelope set by intel)
if intel can't get it to work they shouldn't be selling these chips at all
People want to overclock. Gamers want to see big numbers. If gamers don't do it their motherboard vendors will. It's not a market over which Intel is going to have much control, really.
Note that you don't, in general, see this kind of silly edgelord clocking in the laptop segments.
Out of the box default overclocking is not, this aspect should be policed.
This issue doesn't affect every such machine, but both people affected by the issue that consented to run tests for us still had the issue reproduce after flashing BIOS to current and with BIOS default settings for absolutely everything.
Among the settings enabled by default on some boards: current limit set to 511 amps (...wat), long duration power limit set to 350W (Intel spec: 125W), short duration power limit also set to 350W (Intel spec: 253W), "MultiCore Enhancement" which is extra clock boosting past what the CPUs do themselves set to "Auto" not "Off", and some others.
So, you are trusting all web pages you view? Because these are unknown code running on your box which probably has some beefy private data.
I imagine people doing e.g. heavy number crunching might want something similar.
I'm not affiliated with NoScript. I just think it's insane that we run oodles of code to display web pages.